Netgear WNR3500 + Airport Extreme, is it possible?

Hi Guys,I have a netgear WNR3500 router which works at draft N specification, has a built in gigabit switch and operates in the 2.4 Ghz frequency. I have a western digital mybook world edition network drive hard wired into the router which also operates at gigabit speeds. I have both wireless N and G devices which need to connect to the network.

The G devices will only be using the router for internet access along with accessing small files from the network drive, whereas the other machines will be accessing the router for uploading, downloading and streaming data from the network drive as well. I have discovered that the router can only connect at the speed of 144Mbps to the wireless N devices which is not sufficient for my requirements and want to take full advantage of the 300Mbps available through the 5Ghz frequency. I am aware that the apple airport extreme is capable of this but can only operate at either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz which will mean I cant run any wireless g devices if I use this router on its own.

Im thinking of wiring in the airport extreme base station into the netgear router (or vice versa) and dedicating that to the 5Ghz channel whilst operating the netgear to serve the wireless g clients, however I'm not sure if this is possible, if it would cause complications with the network drive, or what settings i would need to apply to both routers. If anyone could shed any light on this matter it would be greatly appreciated.

You should be able to use the "airport extreme base station" as a basic Wireless Access Point (operating with the 5GHz 802.11a protocol) by disabling its DHCP server and connecting it to the Netgear router "LAN Port to LAN Port".

Trying to run it as a "sub-router", by connecting its WAN port to one of the Netgear's LAN ports, would cause problems because you'd have to operate the two routers in different subnets. Having said that, you might get away with giving the routers the addresses 10.0.1.1 and 10.0.2.1 with the Subnet Mask address of 255.0.0.0 and still have the two subnets communicating.